“Your friend,” she said, standing over Gosling, “the squid?”
George nodded.
She didn’t look exactly concerned, but not unconcerned either. She was oddly emotionless, toughened by this anti-world, wore a mask that you didn’t dare try to lift.
“If you battle the squid,” she said, “you’d better understand the squid.”
With that, she went back into the galley. They could hear her in there, rattling tin cups.
“Maybe I’m dreaming all this,” George said.
“Maybe we all are,” Cushing said. He went to Gosling, checked his pulse and then his eyes. Did not look exactly optimistic about any of it.
The woman returned with tin cups steaming with coffee. Just the aroma was enough to make George want to weep. Maybe he did. He took the cup she offered him and it was warm and soothing in his hands. The coffee wasn’t the best he’d ever tasted, but right then, he couldn’t remember ever having any that good.
“The squid only hunts at night,” she explained to them. “During the day, it dives deep. It does not like light.”
“I take it you’ve had dealings with it before?” George said.
She ignored him, was watching Cushing with Gosling. Watching him very intently. There was almost a softness around her mouth when she looked at Cushing, like maybe he reminded her of someone else. And maybe he did.
“Are you a doctor, Mr. Cushing?”
He shook his head. “No, I’ve had a little medical training. Just enough to get by.”
She stared at him for a time, turned away. “The squid only surfaces at night. Your lights might have drawn it in. I think it hunts by motion, by body heat … it may have been curious about your light. And then … its claws are venomous. Your friend could die.”
“You know a lot about that creature, don’t you?” Cushing said.
“It’s been here long as I have.” She considered that a moment. “I think it may live in the bottom of one of the old derelicts.”
“How long have you been here?” Chesbro asked.
She sighed. “I’m not sure. For a time we kept track, but not anymore. It seems like I’ve always been here. It’s been years, I know that much.”
“You said ‘we’ … are there others?”
She shook her head. “There is myself, my Auntie Else … nobody else. There were ten of us once. The squid killed three the first week. The others … they were attacked by other things. My Uncle Richard, he died … was it last year? I can’t remember. He died of a heart ailment, I think. He went in his sleep. Now it’s just we two.”
George was struck by her almost formal mode of speech. It was peculiar. The sort of diction people used at one time in written correspondence. The idea of that started giving him some funny ideas about how long she’d been there.
“Where is your aunt?” Chesbro asked.
“Sleeping. She’s old … she’s not in her right mind most of the time. Please understand that when you meet her. She’s been through a lot.”
“How do you live here?” George asked. “I mean, what do you eat? Where do you get your food?”
She told him that they lived basically by scavenging. New boats showed up in the seaweed sea all the time, many each year. She raided them for food and supplies, clothing and blankets and fuel oil, anything she could get. She was always looking for survivors, too, but most of them were either dead, missing, or mad by the time they made it this far.
“I’m not the only person here, you know,” Elizabeth said. “I know of five or six others. Most of them are mad, though. You’re all welcome to stay here with us for as long as you want.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” George said, smiling, but getting nothing in return.
Your boyish charm doesn’t shine shit with this girl, he told himself. So just cool it. Besides, quit thinking what you’re thinking … you’ve got a wife and kid back in the world.
True enough, he knew. But Elizabeth Castle
was
desirable. There was something very savage and untamed about her, exotic even. Those eyes, that lilt of hungry mouth, the long-limbed muscular grace she exhibited. But George told himself to stop right there. For he was married and even if he wasn’t, this woman looked at him about as cold as cold could be. You got out of line with her, she’d scratch your eyes out. That was the feeling he was getting from her. She reminded him of a warrior maiden. A woman you knew could out-fight you and probably out-think you, too.
Besides,
he thought,
you see how she’s looking at Cushing. Ain’t the way a sister looks at her brother, you catch my drift.
Sure, Cushing. He had an easy, open way about him. You knew looking into those blue eyes of his that he was intelligent and compassionate, loyal and steady. He was also tall and blond-haired, handsome in a Nordic sort of way. Women probably always went for him.
She told them that she couldn’t honestly remember much of her life before the ship she was on — the
Catherine Belling
— was pulled into the mist en route from Savannah to Bermuda. George figured she could, but didn’t want to. She said that, after a time, the only thing that really mattered was survival, staying alive. That it became a mantra after awhile. There was always work to be done and her days were occupied, so there was very little time to think about what was and what could have been. George figured that was bullshit, too.
“We have a lot of food,” she told them. “Canned and dried, salt pork and bacon. Often, when a new ship arrives, I find fresh meat and fruit, a variety of things. I grow vegetables on another ship in soil that came in boxes. Things grow very fast here.”
“Like the weed,” George said. “That fungus.”
“Yes.” She looked very stern. “You must always be careful about what you eat or drink. You have to boil the water out there before you drink it. It’s salty, but not as salty as the seas back home. But it has germs in it. They can make you very sick. Mostly, I drain water from the tanks of ships. One more thing. You’re welcome here, but understand that there are rules. And the most important is that you never leave this ship unless I’m with you. Later, once you know this place, you can … but not until then.”
“How long does the night last?” George asked her. “A day? Two days?”
At that question, it seemed like Elizabeth was real close to a smile. Close, but not quite there. “I’m so used to this … sometimes it’s hard to remember day and night back there, back where we came from.” She sat on the settee, placed her hands on her knees. “The day here … what we could call the day … lasts about three of our days, sometimes four. The night lasts about two days.”
She said that the mists were so thick that you never actually saw the sun there, though at certain times of the year you could catch a glimpse of it. But never for long. Not like you could with the moons when they were full. Which got George to thinking that if there was a sun and moons, well, then this wasn’t just some cosmic dead-end, it was a world. A planet caught in the orbit of some star he’d never heard of. One that no earth astronomer had probably ever heard of either.
Cushing asked her how large the seaweed sea was and she couldn’t tell him. It was vast, she knew, maybe hundreds if not thousands of miles in diameter, but the exact dimensions were unknown. “I know that you could travel for two days straight and never find anything but weed and water. I’ve never seen any land and never heard of anyone that has.”
“There must be thousands of ships and planes out there,” George said.
“And they keep coming,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes nothing for months and then, suddenly, three or four, five or six. In batches, they always come in batches. But as far as you go in the weed, you’ll find wreckage. Some of it very, very old.”
Chesbro had his head bowed over, praying silently.
Elizabeth Castle was watching him intently. “Is he a minister?” she asked.
But Cushing just shook his head. “No, he just has a deep and abiding faith,” Cushing said with all sincerity.
Good for you,
George thought.
Anyone else might have said that Chesbro was a Jesus freak, a religious nut … but not Cushing. He wouldn’t go there and you couldn’t make him. That’s the kind of guy he was.
“You are very quiet, Mr. Pollard,” Elizabeth remarked.
He nodded. “I guess … I guess I don’t have much to say.”
“He’s okay,” Cushing told her. “He’s been through a lot.”
She and Cushing sat there discussing the specifics of this mad new world, the sort of things that lived there and all the people that must have perished there through the centuries, through the eons. It was real cheerful stuff. Elizabeth spoke of this place as something to be beaten down, something you had to fight at every turn, but nothing you could ever conquer. She was a stubborn, hard-headed woman by all accounts and maybe that’s how she had survived here — through ingenuity and rigid persistence. Maybe all the death she’d seen had made her cling to life all that much more tenaciously.
George thought she looked healthy. Her eyes were bright and her hair was lustrous, her teeth white and strong. But she was pale, her complexion like flawless porcelain. But that was probably due to the lack of sunshine. If people lived here generation by generation, breeding in this place, sooner or later they would have lost all skin pigment.
“All we’ve been holding out for,” Cushing said, “is a way out.”
“There is no way out,” Elizabeth said, her voice stern.
“Have you ever tried?” George put to her.
She gave him a hard, withering look and he felt himself sneak about two inches closer to death. But he didn’t give a shit if it offended her or not. He hated that smug certainty in her voice. Maybe she was satisfied with this place, but there was no way in hell he ever would be.
“Tried? No, I haven’t. Where would I begin?” She kept looking at him. “After a time, there’s only survival. That’s all you can think about.”
“How long have you been here?” Cushing said. “You said years, but-”
“What year did you sail to Bermuda?” George asked, getting right to it.
“What year? Well, I remember that very well. It was March, the second week of March, 1907.”
That landed like a brick and now everyone was staring at her, eyes wide and mouths hanging open.
“Jesus H. Christ,” George said. “1907? Oh my God …”
There was a sudden vulnerability to her, she looked lost and confused and she was certainly those things. She chewed her lip. “I … I’ve been here a long time, haven’t I?”
“I’m just not up to it,” Menhaus announced. “I just don’t have what it takes. I know that now. I played the game and did my best, but, Jesus, I just don’t have the stomach for this.”
Fabrini said, “C’mon now, you can’t give up.”
“Why can’t I?”
But Fabrini didn’t have a good answer for that. He figured Cook might have, but not him. It just wasn’t in him, all the right answers to the right questions. “Because you fucking can’t, that’s why.”
They were sitting on the deck of the fishing boat, an old side trawler out of Florida according to the paperwork in the wheelhouse, trying to figure out what it all meant. What it was all about now that Cook was gone and they were under Saks’s hand again. Something nobody particularly cared for. Saks was down in the captain’s cabin sleeping and Crycek was next door, not sleeping, but lost in one of his blue funks. When he got like that, he was pretty much unreachable. When he spoke, it was all doom and gloom and devils in the fog, prophecies.
“I don’t trust Saks,” Menhaus said. “We had a chance with Cook, I think we really had a chance … but now we’re screwed. Saks doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself.”
Some great revelation, that. “No, and he never did. That’s the kind of prick he is. But I say we just play it out, see what it’s worth. Saks wants to be Mr. Big Man? Okay, let him. Give him the ball and let him run with it.”
Menhaus nodded glumly, barely visible in the darkness. “But I think we had a chance with Cook. I think we really did have a chance.”
Fabrini didn’t like thinking about Cook. He’d come to trust Cook, to like Cook, and his death had not been an easy one and living with the memory of it was harder yet. “Saks has a plan,” Fabrini said.
“Does he?”
“Sure. He’s got an angle. A guy like Saks has always got an angle.” Fabrini sketched out for him what Saks had said. “So, we do like he said: we wait for the fog to lighten, for day or whatever it is to come back. That’s what we have to do. When that happens, we start exploring. Start seeing if there’s any people out there. Maybe find us a decent boat, look for some land and maybe some answers to this mess.”
“There’s no answers.”
“Sure, there is. You just have to be patient. One day at a time. Trust me, Menhaus, and just play along with him. I hate that guy more than anybody.” He touched his bandaged ear in the dark. “But one thing I do know is that guys like Saks are survivors. They have a way of staying alive and if we throw in with him, we’re probably going to stay alive, too.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. Believe me, if there’s a way out of this rathole, Saks is just the sort of guy who can find it. So we hang tight, we follow his plan and maybe … who knows … maybe we’ll find some others out there. Somebody who’ll know the way out or have a good guess about it.”
“I still don’t like him,” Menhaus said.
Fabrini chuckled. “Nobody likes that asshole. But if we wanna stay alive …”
“Then we play the game.”
“You got it.”
But Menhaus didn’t look exactly pleased at the idea of playing any game where a guy like Saks was making up the rules. It was a good way to die.
“I don’t like that shit on his arm,” Menhaus admitted. “I don’t know what it is, but it looks catchy.”
“So don’t dance with him,” Fabrini said.
Menhaus uttered a tiny laugh. “It’s so easy for you, Fabrini, it’s so damn easy for you.”
“No,” Fabrini said. “It’s not.”
The way Cushing had it figured, time was probably horribly distorted in the Dead Sea. When you passed through the vortex, you weren’t necessarily coming out on the other side in the time period you’d left. Time here was not in any direct linear alignment with the world you knew. This is how he explained it to George. Maybe you got swallowed by the fog in 1950, but you came out on the other side in 2010. It was pretty wild fringe science but it made as much sense as anything else. At least it could explain Elizabeth Castle who was certain that she had sailed in 1907 and hadn’t been here more than four or five years at most.